In Hungarian it’s útlevél and in Icelandic it’s vegabréf, both of which literally mean “road-letter”.
Hungarian, of course, thanks! The weird hard language. Every time I think of it, I feel a deep relief that I don’t need to learn it.
Yeah, I always thought of Бутерброд as the open faced sandwich and I associate it with pickles and vodka, but that could be more about my time in Russia, than anything else.
I’d call them more parallel than perpendicular. They work in concert but are (usually) distinguishable.
It lost the trailing ‘t’ because the word was imported from French, where the ‘t’ is not voiced. And the English word, of course, is also imported from French. Restaurants are a French invention of the late 18th century. Sure, there were places where you paid to eat before then, but they weren’t restaurants. They were, e.g., inns.
As may have been mentioned above, many words have been co-opted aurally. I used to work with a Russian-born television reporter who will remain nameless. She told me that the Russian word for Steadicam ( the device I operated for 30+ years ) is “Steadicam”.
There were other broadcast television-specific words that were simply spoken as English but in a Russian accent.
Google Translate confirms.
Стедикам
Stedikam
The term is actually from French, but even then, apparently with Italian origins.
The French, of course, were the height of la mode for a long time, and what was worn at the French court, and what it was called, naturally spread across Europe. The local word for “haircutter” probably just didn’t have the same cachet as using a local version of a French term, used by the high society.
See the etymology of the English word “periwig”, which is a derivation of the French word “peruke”.
As French wikipedia puts it:
Which also points out that technically, one could argue that English doesn’t have a native word for “wig”, because the French word “perruque” gradually got Englished into “periwig”, and then shortened to “wig”.
So why aren’t asking why English has imported the French word “restaurant” or “hotel”—surely, English people didn’t learn these concepts from the French!
Can you imagine the bereft nature of a society and culture that had to learn the words “chair,” “country,” “fruit,” “table,” “stay,” “wait,” “money,” “art,” “music,” “dance,” “blue,” and “use” from the French? One can hardly imagine such a people being able to make it through an average day if they didn’t understand so many things required for human existence!
? I wasn’t asking anything…
We’re talking about cognates here – words that are the same in different languages. Some English cognates that come from Russian include borscht and dacha. Another that is sort of a cognate is babushka, which in English means a sort of head scarf worn by old women such as grandmothers, whereas in Russian it means grandmother. Different meaning but obviously connected.
My favorite English cognate with any language is alcohol. It’s the same in ancient Mesopotamian.
Historically, the Russians have always admired French culture and language. When Peter the Great decided to make Russia more “western” and “modern”, what he mainly mean was to make it more French.
Transliterations can be funny, have you heard of a poet named Уи́льям Шекспи́р (Uíliam Chekspír)? He is actually quite famous.
Cite? My Spanish Wiki says it stems from the Arab al-kuḥl الكحول, or al-ghawl الغول, «the spirit», «any pulverized substance», «distilled liquid», while the English Wiki writes “The word “alcohol” is from the Arabic kohl (Arabic: الكحل, romanized: al-kuḥl ), a powder used as an eyeliner.”
French was the language of court for many tsars. I imagine a lot of government documents in Imperial Russia had French names.
Another occasional use of the word in English is for the nesting dolls which are called matryoshka dolls in Russian. Yes, this comes from a misunderstanding of the meaning of the two words, but that frequently happens when a word from one language is then transferred to being used in another language. So you are free to correct someone when they use babushka for the dolls, but the term is occasionally used in this way:
I think cognates are words that are related through descent from a common ancestral language, not words that are the same through borrowing. So “real” (royal in Spanish) and “raja” (King in Hindi) are cognate words - they both come from an ancient Indo-European word for ruler. The English word “king” is also a cognate (a much harder to recognize one) - but words like “ruler,” “royal”, etc., are words that were forced into English from French due to the Norman invasion and descend from a different line (from Latin, of course).
English had so many words forced into it and borrowed so many that sometimes we get multiple words borrowed at different times from the same language. Thus we have “Warden” (from Norman French) and “guardian” from later non-Norman French.
Another interesting case is “make” - a cognate of the German “machen,” going back to proto-Germanic. But “macher” (an influencer - someone who can make things happen) was borrowed into English in the 20th century, from Yiddish (which of course got it from the German))
I always figured most people knew what they were talking about when referring to babushka [scarves] (which Baba might wear) or matryoshka. Never heard anyone talk about a “babushka doll”, but that is a cromulent character to paint—indeed stereotypically it is some kind of peasant wearing a scarf and sarafan.
From
3 a : related by descent from the same ancestral languageSpanish and French are cognate languages.
b of a word or morpheme : related by derivation, borrowing, or descent
English “eat” and German “essen” are cognate.
c of a substantive : related to a verb usually by derivation and serving as its object to reinforce the meaning (such as song in “she sang a song”)
Does that apply to “borscht”? We stole that word straight from Russian - it didn’t descend in both English and Russian from a common ancestor.
I don’t remember where I read that long ago – or perhaps I imagined it. But hunting around I only find origins like you posted.
So, I think I got that wrong. Thank you for the correction!
Akkadian for booze is šikāru, still extant in Semitic languages today. guḫlu is the eye make-up.